I’m super excited to now be sharing thoughts
and advice on navigating academia via my monthly Office Hours column in
Chemical & Engineering News! I’ll be posting unedited versions of my columns
on delay here on my blog, and you can catch the best and latest versions (and contribute
your questions!) at my C&EN Office Hours site. As
always, comments welcome – these topics impact us all, and we should all be
part of the dialogue!
How do you combat
imposter syndrome during big transitions (undergrad to grad school, grad school
to postdoc, postdoc to faculty, etc) and how do you prevent imposter syndrome
from affecting your success? -Sara Dubbury
So, are these thoughts accurate? Probably not. Our
insecurities are usually based upon fallacies – deceptive thought patterns that
our mind casts upon reality. In the case
of impostor syndrome, I’ve seen two main fallacies. The first is a “subjective”
belief that you don’t belong where you are – you can’t quite put your finger on
a specific way in which everyone is better than you, but you sense that they
are perfect and you know that you are not. This is especially common during the
transitions that you mention – you are joining a new lab or workplace with new
people, and while you are struggling to get your bearings and figure out how to
be successful there, everyone else seems to have it mastered. The second type of fallacy is a seemingly
“objective” one – it’s based on data, and as scientists, we all love data,
right? This happens when you look around and recognize that you are an outlier
compared to everyone else around you.
This happened to me recently at a symposium in which I was invited to
participate. As I surveyed the list of speakers, it quickly became apparent
that by all metrics – seniority, job title, awards – “one of these people was
not like the others,” and that person was me.
How do we counter each of these? I often hear the advice to
do something that builds up your confidence and helps you to convince yourself
that you deserve to be there. But, I’ve always felt uncomfortable with this
advice. First, that’s just a really challenging thing to do, especially in the
face of data that might seem to suggest otherwise, such as the case with my
symposium invite. Second, this creates a slippery slope toward entitlement – if
I convince myself that I deserve to be somewhere, then I might think that I no
longer have to work hard to excel. I might also convince myself that the people
who didn’t make it to that place don’t in fact deserve to be there. That’s not
a thought pattern that I want to spend time in.
My approach is to instead recognize that it really doesn’t
matter where I deserve to be or not be, because I am there and I’m
thankful for that and I want to make the most of it. It also helps to take a
step back and change my perspective on the situation. In the case of starting
out in a new lab or stage of your career, recognize that the people around you
seem to know what they’re doing because they’ve been there for a while, and
that they were once just like you – the new person feeling lost and struggling
to figure everything out. They developed their knowledge and skills by working
hard and improving each day, and you can do the same. In the case of an
“objective” set of metrics that suggest you don’t belong, consider that you
might be looking at the wrong metrics. Our thoughts can make us downplay the
importance of areas where we excel, while magnifying the importance of areas
where we struggle.
Importantly, fighting impostor syndrome is something that
you don’t have to do alone. Enlist the help of friends, colleagues, and mentors
to remind you that you’ve developed expertise and thrived in new situations
before and can do that again, or to point out the unique set of skills and
accomplishments that you have but might not recognize. Finally, if all else fails, when your
thoughts tell you that everyone around you has it all figured out, recognize
that they probably also got it right when they chose to hire you or invite you.
Your all post is very nice thankyou so much for sharing such a great information with us. You can also visit our blog Jobs for Pregnant Women
ReplyDeleteVery informative blog, i never knew such things. Thanks for sharing this and for letting us learn something new..!!
ReplyDeleteCultivating Emotional Balance